A Study Of College English Learners' Autonomous Listening Ability

With the accelerating process of globalization and the rapid increasing number of knowledge and information, China has entered into a life-long education and learning society. Therefore, cultivating learners'sustainable learning competence—autonomous learning ability is urgently needed. In the eighties of the 20th century, "autonomous learning" was introduced into foreign language teaching, and since then, it has aroused a hot discussion in China. The researchers of second language at home and abroad all take the cultivation of autonomous learning ability as one of the most important aims of language education. Throughout the previous studies, it is not difficult to find that these researches mainly study English autonomous learning as a whole, and the research subjects are mainly English majors. However, rare efforts are made to study a certain skill of English learning, especially English listening. Therefore, it is necessary for us to refine autonomous learning to a more detailed field—English listening.This thesis conducts a survey among 205 learners who come from three different universities and major in five different specialties through a questionnaire and an interview. The research content includes three aspects: 1) the learners'overall autonomous listening ability; 2) the differences in autonomous listening ability between three antithetic groups of learners (English majors and non-English majors, male and female learners, high achievement and low achievement learners); 3) the relationship between autonomous listening ability and listening proficiency. Based on the analysis, we find that learners'autonomous listening ability is correlated positively with their listening proficiency and learners'management of and plans for their listening learning rank the first and the second in affecting listening proficiency. However, the learners'autonomous listening ability is unsatisfactory due to their lack of autonomous learning awareness and learning strategies. Independent sample T- tests show that the specialty and gender are not key factors in determining learners'autonomous listening ability, while high achievement and low achievement learners differ from each other significantly.Based on the above research results, this thesis proposes four suggestions for promoting learners'autonomous listening ability: 1) to arouse both learners'and teachers'autonomous learning awareness; 2) to reinforce strategy training; 3) to advocate cooperation in listening learning; 4) to increase learners'self-efficacy in listening. The study combines autonomy and listening learning, which refines autonomous learning to a certain skill of English learning and expands the scope of autonomous learning studies.